Hard Drive Problems

[kidstar64]

Ok,

So I had partitioned my hard drives into 3 diffrent partitions. I just recombined all of the partitions without formating. Everything is in proper working order except when creating directories or files and and deleting directories and files. So I boot into UBCD4Win live cd and fully defragment my hard drive and ran chkdsk but still its extreamly slow. is there anyway I can fix it without having to lose all of my data?

Thanks,

Kidstar64

[Sparda]

is there anyway I can fix it without having to lose all of my data?

Thanks,

Kidstar64

back it up

[kidstar64]

hard to back up like 250 GB of data. Is there a way to rebuld the "index" of the harddrive.

[Sparda]

Formating it will rebuild the (blank) directory structure. File systems (specifically FAT and NTFS) aren't designed to be merged*. If check disk doesn't work, your pretty screwed. You could try fsck.vfat off a Ubuntu disk, but it seems unlikely that this will fix it either.

*The way to merge a file system is to copy the files from one to the other. This method may, however, cause conflicts.

[nicatronTg]

Yah, it does more bad then good to merge partitions. I tried this once, ended up copying everything I cared about onto a flash drive, and reformatting. I guess, if you had access to the physical locations of the partition, you could repartition the drive to the exact specs... but that may conflict if you defragmented.

So, copy all files you need / care about, and do a reformat.

[natural_orange]

what tool did you use?

I know apps like acronis disk director will allow you to do this though i have never tried it.

The best way to do something like this would be to buy another HDD and move all the data over.  HDD's are cheap so if its important i would try that instead.

Partitions are evil!!! whoever created partitions should rot in hell, the former sysadmin at my work insisted on splitting a normal HDD into like 4 partitions for backup or something i never understood why.

[snakey]

backup don't complain

[nicatronTg]

what tool did you use?

I know apps like acronis disk director will allow you to do this though i have never tried it.

The best way to do something like this would be to buy another HDD and move all the data over.  HDD's are cheap so if its important i would try that instead.

Partitions are evil!!! whoever created partitions should rot in hell, the former sysadmin at my work insisted on splitting a normal HDD into like 4 partitions for backup or something i never understood why.

If partitions were evil, how come they saved my butt numerous times. I deleted part of windows once, but my clone partition had my stuff. A couple clicks and I had windows XP again.

[Sparda]

It's nice to put / in a 15GB partition then /home on the rest of the drive. That way when your tinkering and you hose it because your a bit silly, you can reinstall and every thing is there just the same except you need to install all your packages again which is easy because you can generate a script to install all your packages for you.

[SomeoneE1se]

partitions are really good

and linux's recursive file system is crap!

[Sparda]

and linux's recursive file system is crap!

What do you mean by recursive?

You can create recessiveness in the file structure if you want.

ln -s / /face

However, if you go beyond the 254th directory, you will get a access denied error.

But this is only because it's so flexible. This flexibility was very useful on the Solaris machines at my university. The tech's decided that the default save directory was going to be ~/Documents where it used to be ~, so I created a symlink that point ~/Documents back to ~ fixing all the problems it caused.

[SomeoneE1se]

how about /home and / being two different partitions but /home being a sub directory of /

and /dev/sda is / but /dev/sda is again a sub directory

[Sparda]

how about /home and / being two different partitions but /home being a sub directory of /

XP and up can do that as well, to get around the poor design of having only 23~ characters available for drives.

and /dev/sda is / but /dev/sda is again a sub directory

/dev/<hard drive> referees to a block device. That is, a device that must be accessed purely in a binary non-human friendly fashion (can take a hex value editor to /dev/<hard drive> if you wish). When /dev/<hard drive> is interpreted by some algorithm (a file system handler?) it then becomes useful.

I personally find this design to be far superior to windows file system and partition and drive handling.

A excellent example of this would be: Windows media Center is retarded, and can only ever look at two directories for media. If it weren't so poorly designed this would not be the case, however, this is not the point. My point is that if the way windows uses file systems wasn't so poor I could work around this by mounting all my media locations inside one of the locations that windows media player looks for stuff. XP and up can only mount hard drive partitions inside directories and won't do CD drive, network shares etc, which is absolutely no good.

Way's that Linux helps DRM: The drives are already directly accessible in /dev, no need to install a waco driver that gives it direct access. (Like has to be done in Windows).

BSD slicing just seem unnecessary some how, i don't get how slicing a partition helps any thing tbh.

[SomeoneE1se]

XP and up can do that as well, to get around the poor design of having only 23~ characters available for drives.

I don't like that either. but when would you need more then 23 partition letters?

because at some point it would be better to get a NAS or use RAID

/dev/<hard drive> referees to a block device. That is, a device that must be accessed purely in a binary non-human friendly fashion (can take a hex value editor to /dev/<hard drive> if you wish). When /dev/<hard drive> is interpreted by some algorithm (a file system handler?) it then becomes useful.

why does this matter?

I personally find this design to be far superior to windows file system and partition and drive handling.

why? because I hate it and find it annoying as hell.

A excellent example of this would be: Windows media Center is retarded, and can only ever look at two directories for media. If it weren't so poorly designed this would not be the case,

No that's a bad example, you said yourself it's programmed incorrectly.  Go back to the developers of the software to fix the problem with the software don't tell the makers of the OS to change their enitire system design just  because one piece of software is fucked.

however, this is not the point.

then why bring it up?

My point is that if the way windows uses file systems wasn't so poor I could work around this by mounting all my media locations inside one of the locations that windows media player looks for stuff. XP and up can only mount hard drive partitions inside directories and won't do CD drive, network shares etc, which is absolutely no good.

see above it's not the OSes responsibility to fix bugs in software

Way's that Linux helps DRM: The drives are already directly accessible in /dev, no need to install a waco driver that gives it direct access. (Like has to be done in Windows).

huh?

[BSDFan]

BSD slicing just seem unnecessary some how, i don't get how slicing a partition helps any thing tbh.

While it may seem, "unnecessary" to you. .  it's necessary for BSD users.

BSD partition labels predate the IBM PC's MBR partitions.

One really cool benefit is the ability to create up to 16 partitions per drive, each of which can be mounted with separate options:

/dev/wd0a / ffs rw 1 1
/dev/wd0g /home ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
/dev/wd0d /tmp ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
/dev/wd0f /usr ffs rw,nodev 1 2
/dev/wd0e /var ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2

In this case, I can prevent devices/setuid root files from being used inside various mount points.

I typically backup a few things from /etc and /var each month then start fresh, preserving only my home partition. .  :)

Oh, And hello everyone, this happens to be my first post.  8-)

[Sparda]

Way's that Linux helps DRM: The drives are already directly accessible in /dev, no need to install a waco driver that gives it direct access. (Like has to be done in Windows).

huh?

See Starforce Wikipedia page. The starforce driver wouldn't have had to be installed to work on Linux.

The example I used is applicable. The software is flawed and really should be fixed. Problems such as this are often run in to when using propitiatory software, and if your locked in to this software for some reason, workarounds may have to be used as you have already purchased the software and the vendor won't fix it, and the vendor should be burnt at the stake. In the example of "Software will only use x number of directories where it may be needed to access y number of others while configured to access x but y directories are on another computer". The ability to create recursive directories and mount other file systems with in other file systems is very useful.

[SomeoneE1se]

Way's that Linux helps DRM: The drives are already directly accessible in /dev, no need to install a waco driver that gives it direct access. (Like has to be done in Windows).

huh?

See Starforce Wikipedia page. The starforce driver wouldn't have had to be installed to work on Linux.

The example I used is applicable. The software is flawed and really should be fixed. Problems such as this are often run in to when using propitiatory software, and if your locked in to this software for some reason, workarounds may have to be used as you have already purchased the software and the vendor won't fix it, and the vendor should be burnt at the stake. In the example of "Software will only use x number of directories where it may be needed to access y number of others while configured to access x but y directories are on another computer". The ability to create recursive directories and mount other file systems with in other file systems is very useful.

does starforce even work on linux... if it doesn't it's completely pointless...

so are you saying a problem with the software should be fixed by the OS it runs on?

[Sparda]

so are you saying a problem with the software should be fixed by the OS it runs on?

Absolutely not. What I am saying, however, is that if Windows didn't use the model of drive access that it does use (meaning, if used used what every other dominant OS used), the OS would be more stable. Software that wanted to access the drive directly would not have need of installing drivers. I'm also saying that a system where by you can have partitions located within partitions in a file system structure can be a very powerful tool.

[kidstar64]

Update

Hard drive was not the problem, shitty windows vista file explorer sucks. I solved this problem by turing off windows search serivce